How the Urban Poor Define and Measure Food Security in Cambodia and Nepal

Abstract

Urban food security, or its lack, is attracting growing interest in global policy debates. Glaringly missing in these conversations, however, are the voices of the urban poor. To fill this gap, grassroots community organizations, with decades-long experience collecting data on their own communities and taking action to improve conditions, decided to ask the urban poor in Cambodia and Nepal how they define and measure food security, what key challenges they face in the daily struggle to put food on the table and what actions might help. Their findings show that access to adequate diets is a major challenge for low-income communities in Asia, and that hunger is widespread, although with great variations and fluctuations between and within households. They also highlight the extraordinary resilience of urban poor women and their multiple strategies to stretch meagre budgets and make sure there is something to eat, even though sometimes this is not enough.